ram not recognized

[a Bill]

I'm not too swift in this area, but my guess woudl be that there is a BIOS limitation. Hey, it's worth a shot http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[micalah]

thank you for trying, but if there is a bios limitation, it is not spelled out plainly enough for me to recognize it, as i have looked for this.

[fishboy]

The most obvious thought that came to mind was that you might have two bad simm slots. 2nd, is this a modern board? (I think you said it was old, right 486?) I have seen boards that do not like Fast Paged Mode(non edo) Ram that work fine with EDO. My first guess is still bas slots

[This message has been edited by fishboy (edited 05-29-99).]

[micalah]

yes, it is a 486 board and the very limited documentation that i have been able to find on this board indicates that it likes fpm dram simms. as for the bad slots, i have mixed the arrangement of simms sufficiently for me to believe that the slots are okay. atleast i can see no difference in behavior no matter which slots i use.

[fishboy]

Try with first only two Simms. Do you get 16mb read when you put the Simms in bank 1-2 and bank 3-4? Sometimes you have to play around with the order. See what happens if you use bank 1 and 4 and then 2 and 3. Check to see if there are any voltage regulators (jumper) on the board. I believe the voltage needs to be 5v but I could be wrong.

[reboot]

This has nothing to do with voltages or BIOS!
This mobo will only run FASTPAGE RAM, not EDO.
You cannot mix the two together and expect anything.
Take the EDO back and get Fastpage, the mobo should recognize up to 64 meg, although maybe only 32.
Cheers, Jim

[micalah]

fast page ram is what i have. i have also tried the combinations mentioned by fishboy but got the same results. i am still trying to find something that looks like a voltage setting. however, you are correct. this board does only use fpm ram.

[BBA]

Try to find a bios flash, if its available flash it!

I see a lot of old PC's that wont recognize above a ram limit per chip or total. Flashing has fixed every one so far!

BBA

[micalah]

i have a hand-me-down ms-4137(VLB 486 AL2)motherboard into which i am trying to install 4 new, tested, and identical 8meg, non edo, non parity simms. i have installed these in every possible combination and even introduced a 4 meg simm into the mix so that i would get a count of something other than 8 or 16, but the "counter" will only recognize up to 16meg of the ram. any ideas?

[micalah]

(to fishboy: i've found the voltage jumpers, and the ones labelled 5v have jumpers across them, so i assume this means that the board is set at 5v.)

as for flashing the bios, this is something that i have had no dealings with. can you offer some direction, such as how do i find out if one is available and then what do i do with it...thank for any help

[Bazango]

Ditto, I am having similar memory problems.

[mac]

maybe you have one bad simm,try putting just
two in at a time and see if you ever just read 8 instead of 16.if you do then the other bank would not work with the bad simm and you would never see more than 16.

[micalah]

thanks for the suggestion, but every combination that you can think of, i have already tried. i even installed the ram into another computer and it counted up to 32meg as it should. so, it would seem that all of the simms are good. i must have another problem.

[micalah]

does anyone have any tips on the flashing the bios idea

[BBA]

I cant find anything on the numbers you gave. See if you can get the BIOS string number, it is usually shown on boot up, just write down all the data you can see and post it here.

BBA

[micalah]

to bba:

ami bios string
40-p0000-001169-00101111-072594-ali1445-u

thank you.thank you.thank you...i hope you can find something

[BBA]

Try this for the Bios:

http://www.ping.be/bios/files/biosfiles/4143.zip

I think its the one you need. I got it here:
http://www.ping.be/bios/

BBA

[BBA]

Well, did it work?

..

[800XL]

In my 486 days, I had more trouble with 8meg simms than any other size. They are double sided, and sometimes require you change a jumper(s) on the board to a different setting. My old M-Tech R407E board has two configs for RAM, on that allows double sided simms, one that does not. It looks like, from what I saw and what BBA had to say, that you have a Micro-Star MS-4143 or something similar to it. I dug a little more and found this info: http://www.msi-computer.de/faq/15.html that talks about 8meg simms. Look all the way down to the bottom of the page. That same site may have more info, but most of the navigation links are in German so it is hard to find your way to stuff.

[micalah]

to bba: i have downloaded the bios file that you pointed me to, but i am still searching the net for instructions as to what to do with it. most of what i am finding emphasize caution, so i am a little afraid to try this since i don't really know what i am doing. once i work up my courage, i will let you know what happens.

to 800xl: this makes sense, unfortunately it looks as though my only option now (with this board) is to switch to single-sided simms. thanks for taking the time to research this. i thought i had been all around that site but found nothing like you were able to.

[micalah]

according to the site previously mentioned, this problem has been blamed on the ali chipset, which will only recognize four simm slots, and 2 of my double-sided 8megs are taking up all that this chipset will recognize. are there any bios tweak or tricks that will allow for a fix to this?